Clifford Stein, Wai T. Chang Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research and of Computer Science, will serve as interim director of the Data Science Institute (DSI) at Columbia University. He is working closely with Jeannette Wing, newly appointed executive vice president for research, on this transition in leadership.
Stein joined Columbia in 2001 after a decade in the Department of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. He served as chair of Columbia’s Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department from 2008-2013, and he has been integral to DSI’s success as its associate director of research.
Stein’s academic research focuses on the design and analysis of algorithms, combinatorial optimization, green computing, and big data. He has occupied a variety of editorial positions including the journals Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Transactions on Algorithms, Mathematical Programming, Journal of Algorithms, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Journal on Discrete Mathematics, and Operations Research Letters. He is the co-author of two textbooks, one of which, Introduction to Algorithms, with T. Cormen, C. Leiserson and R. Rivest, is the bestselling textbook in algorithms, has sold more than three quarters of a million copies, and has been translated into 15 languages. He is also the winner of several awards including a National Science Foundation Career Award and an Alfred Sloan Research Fellowship, and is an ACM Fellow.
Stein received a B.S.E. in computer science from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.